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John Payton, Lawyer Who Fought for Civil Rights, Dies at 65

John Payton, who as president of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund guided it to several major victories before the Supreme Court, died on Thursday in Baltimore. He was 65 and lived in Washington.

The cause had not yet been determined, said Lee Daniels, a spokesman for the fund.

In 2010, he was the lead attorney for the plaintiffs in Lewis v. City of Chicago, in which a group of African-Americans seeking to be firefighters contended that they had properly filed a charge of discrimination against the city.

Mr. Payton argued that the cutoff score on a written examination to define the pool of qualified applicants had a disparate impact on minorities — a contention to which the city conceded. But the city had successfully argued in lower courts that the discrimination charge was filed after a statute of limitations had passed. The Supreme Court unanimously reversed the lower court ruling.

A year earlier, in Northwest Austin Municipal Utility District No. 1 v. Holder, a municipal district in Austin, Tex., challenged the validity of Section 5, a core provision of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The so-called pre-clearance clause requires government entities previously judged to have a history of discrimination to receive permission from the Justice Department before making substantive changes to the voting process in their districts. Mr. Payton assisted in the arguments leading to the Supreme Court’s 8-to-1 decision upholding Section 5.

In a statement on Friday, President Obama called Mr. Payton “a true champion of equality” who had “helped protect civil rights in the classroom and at the ballot box.”

In 2003, while he was in private practice, Mr. Payton was the lead counsel for the University of Michigan in defending the use of race as a factor in admissions for its College of Literature, Science and the Arts.

A critical point of contention in the case, Gratz v. Bollinger, was whether a diverse student body was of compelling interest to the state. “In order to achieve this broad diversity, we must take race and ethnicity into account,” Mr. Payton argued. The Supreme Court ruled against the university in that case but upheld its law school’s affirmative-action policy in a related case, Grutter v. Bolinger.

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John PaytonCredit
Alex Brandon/Associated Press

In 2010, the National Law Journal named Mr. Payton to its list of “The Decade’s Most Influential Lawyers.”

John Adolphus Payton was born in Los Angeles on Dec. 27, 1946, to John and Ida Mae Payton. Mr. Payton enrolled at Pomona College in 1965. At that time, he was one of only a handful of black students in the five colleges in Claremont, Calif. By his senior year, he had successfully lobbied Pomona’s administration to recruit more black students and to start a black studies program. Financial pressures forced him to work and study part time; he graduated in 1973.

A year later he enrolled at Harvard Law School. At that time, Boston was embroiled in its famous school busing controversy. As a law student, he worked on taking affidavits from black students who were injured in the race-related violence. He graduated in 1977.

Mr. Payton went into corporate law and became a partner in the Washington law firm Wilmer, Cutler, Pickering, Hale & Dorr.

He took leave from the firm in the early 1990s to serve as the corporation counsel for the District of Columbia, and in 1993, President Bill Clinton nominated him to be assistant attorney general for civil rights.

Mr. Payton withdrew from consideration for the post after many members of the Congressional Black Caucus opposed the nomination. They were angered by his noncommittal answers to questions about whether the Voting Rights Act permits the creation of Congressional districts with a majority of black voters.

A year later, he was a member of a group of international monitors to the presidential election in South Africa.

Mr. Payton is survived by his wife of 20 years, Gay McDougall; two sisters, Janette Oliver and Susan Grissom; and a brother, Glenn Spears.

“Democracy, at its core, requires that all of the people be included in ‘We the people,’ ” Mr. Payton said in a 2008 speech in Michigan. “For that inclusive democracy to function, it is essential that we see each other as peers.”

Correction: April 1, 2012

An obituary last Sunday about the civil rights lawyer John Payton misstated his role in defending the affirmative-action policies of the University of Michigan. He argued Grutter v. Bollinger, a case involving the university’s law school, before a district court, which ruled against the university, and before an appeals court, which reversed that decision; he also argued Gratz v. Bollinger, a separate case involving the university’s College of Literature, Science and the Arts, before the Supreme Court, which ruled against the university. He did not argue the Grutter case before the Supreme Court, which ruled in the university’s favor.

A version of this article appears in print on March 25, 2012, on page A26 of the New York edition with the headline: John Payton, 65, Lawyer Who Fought for Civil Rights. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe